Month: September 2011

Volunteering for Mountain Gorillas

Volunteering for Mountain Gorillas

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Valerie Fox wrote:
I want to see the Mountain gorillas in Rwanda. Ideally, I would like to volunteer Directly to help them, and see them more than just 1-2 days as is offered one most the tour trips. I am an RN and could volunteer in this capacity in order to stay longer and possibly have a chance to see gorillas more than once. When is best time to go? Who can I contact so I am not paying some tourist company thousands and not directly helping.

Valerie, thanks for your email and I hope you’ll soon find yourself in that wonderland! And please read my blog, today, which was motivated by your request.

I have promised my friends in Rwanda that I won’t refer any such requests unless you can guarantee a half year commitment. If you can, let me know, and then there will be a rigorous vetting process to see if your available experiences and credentials can be of some use.

And as my blog, today, explains, I personally believe that the greatest conservation act that has saved the mountain gorillas is simply the tourists going there.

It’s hard to give you a good “best time” answer, because the weather is changing so dramatically in East and Central Africa as a result of global warming. In the past, the heavy rain months of March-May were best avoided, but this year for example, March was dry and July was extremely wet. The fact is that in a highland rain forest it rains almost all the time, anyway, so anyone traveling there at any time must be prepared for rain. And other than that, note that 56 intrepid travelers go up every single day of the year!

Volunteerism Not Always Good

Volunteerism Not Always Good

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

I often receive requests by sincere travelers who want to volunteer in Africa. The latest is from an enthusiastic woman who wants to help the mountain gorillas. She doesn’t want to pay “some tourist company thousands and not directly help.” Like many well meaning people, she’s got it very wrong.

Particularly with regards to the mountain gorillas, it’s my opinion that tourists doing nothing more than “paying thousands to tour companies” do as much if not more to help the mountain gorillas than scientists.

Read In the Kingdom of the Gorillas by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, the two scientists who began the mountain gorilla project in the 1970s. From that book alone (and there are many more) you’ll see that without tourists paying the huge fee to the Rwandan government just for the privilege of seeing the gorillas, plus the funds paid local transporters and hoteliers, it is likely there would be no mountain gorillas left.

The sentiment to volunteer is a hopeful one, to be sure, and shared by many enthusiastic conservationists. And it is typical of caring travelers and crosses well beyond animal conservation into all areas of volunteerism.

Volunteerism can be good, please don’t mistake me. But there are several negative sides to it which send up serious red flags to the organizations involved.

Casual volunteers usually cause more difficulties than they expect. The most important one is time. Unless you have a half year to dedicate to some project, it’s unlikely you’ll be invited to assist. This is as true for mountain gorilla research at Kinigi as it is for AIDS education in Soweto.

Someone coming for just a month, for example, causes tremendous housekeeping problems such as food and housing (which you cannot try to do yourself).

Integrating the skills of a new team member into the team is as hard for an experienced field researcher as a casual volunteer. It takes careful analysis and if done wrong can compromise the goals of the entire project.

Analyzing your skills by a potential project takes time and money. Mistaking your capabilities, or inappropriately allocating your skills, will cost the project even more time and money. And today, time and money are scarcer than ever.

The mountain gorilla project in particular is not your down-the-street food bank. The people who work there are highly educated, generally postdocs, in highly specific fields. Of course any organization can use someone to paint the walls, but doing that robs part of the high intentions of the project: it takes those types of jobs away from Rwandans.

Remember that a principal goal of practically any aid project, whether it be animal conservation or public health, is to ultimately turn that project over to locals. The first stage of this implementation is turning over the least skilled jobs, something that is almost always the rating of a casual volunteer.

And finally, there is a negative side that is extremely important to me personally that people must try to understand. Volunteering in any sense can coopt one’s support for the grander projects that carry real potential. Projects that are government to government, or foreign aid support of organizations like the Mountain Gorilla Project.

Our first and foremost responsibility as true conservationists and sincere volunteers is to support politics at home that will continue to fund the organizations we support. If you were able to expend energy, for example, in making sure that your political representatives supported USAid projects of the Mountain Gorilla Project, and you and others were successful, you will have achieved a much greater goal in helping the gorillas than anything you could do personally in a short time there.

I am happy and willing to link anyone with trained skills appropriate to projects in Africa with any of a number of organizations, provided you have a half year or more available. Let me know! Otherwise, recognize that it is we paean tourists who have done the greatest good for the mountain gorillas, just by going there and “paying thousands” to the local government and local businesses!

Safari RoundUp

Safari RoundUp

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David Heiman, Roger & Ellen Sirlin and Lynn Heiman.
Our 14-day dry season safari in Kenya and Tanzania ended with a beautiful morning in the Mara, hardly a breeze and high wisps of cloud suggesting afternoon rain. The quantity of big animals we’d seen threatened my past records, and like every guide on earth, my greatest wish was that all my clients had a great time.

People who choose to go on a safari do so with a lot more thought and consideration than just a quick hop over to Europe or golf holiday in Arizona. And it isn’t just the money. They know it isn’t a typical vacation of R&R, but a journey that involves a lot of personal energy.

So having already made this decision, no matter what goes wrong – no matter how dusty it might be, or hot, or cold(!), or how long the wait for the charter aircraft, or lodge check-in or delivery of the much needed cold beer, there is a tolerance from virtually every safari traveler probably not to be expected from travelers on a more ordinary trip.

And so it’s sometimes hard for us as guides to really gauge how people feel. They’ll insist they had a great time, but did they really?

Our trip was pretty typical of my designed safaris. It starts off with some pretty good game viewing, and with the least comfortable of the accommodations, and then grows into greater comfort and a slightly slower pace, and then regains superb game viewing towards the end.

But even this formula demands some serious personal effort. To even partially grasp the magnificence of the wild and the fragile political and social systems in which it’s found, there’s a lot of information you’ve got to grasp.

Sue MacDonald, Dave Heiman,
Margy & Roger Gelfenbien, and Alfred.
I always spend time in Nairobi, discussing history and culture, and this time I think the folks were really blown away by the dynamism if over busy-ness of Nairobi. But I’m so optimistic about Kenya at the moment, that I think I conveyed this positive feeling well.

Anyone can bop over to the Mara for a few days and almost always get the Big 5, yes including rhino, now that the rhino rehabilitation projects have proved so successful. And the Mara is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

But to grasp the East African wilds, and how dangerously close they are to self-annihilation, other goals are necessary: like finding the migration or some arcane animal like a serval or ratel. To sense the importance of preserving the wild, you have to stick with some event – like an elephant family on their way through a forest to who knows where, or a lion with a bloody face, or a limping antelope – to recognize the intricacy of everything with one another.

And this takes time. And driving, and believe me, the park roads aren’t like ours at home! There’s a lot of bumping, and swaying and probably heavy handed grasps of the nearest window rail!

But when properly prepared and fully cognizant of what you’re getting into, It think it ends up being one of the most satisfying and memorable of life’s experiences.

I won’t list the animal or bird count on this safari, because so much is dependent upon atypical conditions, but we did very, very well. Personally, my greatest memory will be finding the migration in the northern most reaches of the Serengeti, a month or longer before it was due there.

We were able to see the world changing, climate change at work. We can see how great animals are adapting, and the hazards they are encountering doing so.

I know that others were mesmerized by the seven kills we found. Many people can’t take these for very long, and I understand that. But certainly one of the most amazing encounters we had this time was seeing a lone hyaena that had just killed a yearling wildebeest.

It was exactly 42 minutes from the time that lone hyaena began to eat, that the entire wilde was essentially gone. Ten other hyaena arrived, jackal nibbled away, vultures cleaned off the last pieces. It was amazing.

Our camp kitchen staff!
For its speed and efficiency.

Seeing the wild southern elephants of Tarangire was another great memory. Few people go down that far into Tarangire, content with the incredible encounters with the more resident and friendly eles to the north. We were surrounded – literally – by eles that don’t see a lot of people. They were wild, vicious perhaps, and most of all, incredibly powerful.

I had a fabulous time. My clients said so, too, and I hope as they reflect as I am now on the innumerable special moments, their appreciation for the wild and connection with East Africa will be established for the rest of their lives.

Marvel of the Mara

Marvel of the Mara

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I took this picture yesterday in the Mara. Nine other vehicles were watching with us.
Twenty-seven lion, five cheetah, a rhino, 4 kills (not take-downs), a serval, two leopard (one with a recent kill) and a hyaena kill of a wildebeest. In three days in the Mara. And lots of vehicles. Is this a zoo?

No, of course it isn’t. It is Kenya’s best game park, the Maasai Mara. So we ended our safari with incredible game viewing, and it was expected. But am I showing my clients the wilds of Africa?

The Mara proper is hardly a tenth the size of the Serengeti, sits right on top of it, and is the northernmost venue for the great migration. It has almost 4 times as much accommodation as the Serengeti, despite its much smaller size. So, yes, it can seem busy if crowded compared to the Serengeti.

Ellen Sirlin watching hyaena kill.
But it is busy precisely because the game viewing is always so exceptionally good. The quantitative exponent of game viewing in the Mara is rarely duplicated elsewhere. The dozen or so hyaena around the lion we saw, the 100 vultures plus assorted jackals and storks, was typical of my experiences in the Mara every time I go, and 3 to 4 times the number of animals and birds that would normally be seen on a Serengeti kill. Why?

For two intertwining reasons.

First, the Mara is the wettest part of the Serengeti/Ngrongoro/Mara ecosystem. And wet means more food at every level, and that means more predators and ultimate cleanupers.

Roger Sirlin watching lion eat.

Second, more animals means more visitors and the Mara is probably the most congested game park in East Africa. Lion brush aside your vehicle, vultures clip your canvas rooftop when landing, hippos block the road into your camp and crocodile lay eggs a few feet under your tent.

And rarely are you the only one snapping photos. I try very hard and do often succeed, but if you want to see the rhino, or the cheetah take-down, you’ll be sharing the experience often with 10-20 other vehicles.

Sue MacDonald watching a rhino.
All this visitor activity means that the animals are much more tolerant of people and vehicles than anywhere else I’ve ever been in Africa. Animal tolerance of vehicles surprises all visitors almost everywhere, but the indifference of Mara animals to visitors is almost beyond belief.

But here’s the rub. Remove the visitors, the vehicles, the people, and I think it fair to argue very little of anything else would change.

So are we really experiencing truly wild and natural behaviors?

Yes. For the Mara. It’s as natural as garlic mustard taking over Yosemite or chronic wasting diseases menacing recreational hunting in Wisconsin. What I’m saying is that in the Mara it is a real balance of life as it exists there, today.

It is certainly not the way it was a generation or more ago. And it is certainly not the way it is in most other reserves in East Africa.

Even in the Serengeti, which shares a border with the Mara and several rivers, animals grow more suspicious of human visitors and their vehicles. But even so, these “wilder” behaviors in other East African reserves are far tamer than they were in Africa 50 years ago.

Then, African wildernesses weren’t as protected. People competed with animals for the same turf, and people are more clever. Animals were afraid of people, people would just as likely kill as preserve anything wild, and so wild things were harder to observe, less obvious.

David & Lynn Heiman, Roger & Ellen Sirlin.
In other words, if you want to make wild animals accessible to the casual visitor, a dynamic will begin that will make the animals less suspicious of visitors, and that will bring in more visitors, and that will make the animals even tamer and tamer. I can’t see any way to stop this.

So the complaint I have about this marvel in the Mara is the growing number of other visitors. And as a visitor, you have to decide if you want to see it all, rather easily and quickly, or prefer as I think I do the less congested wilderness.

This dynamic – the marvel of the Mara – has happened only in my life time. It’s something that I feel has been achieved at the loss of “wildness” which is still easily experienced in places like The Selous or the Serengeti.

But nostalgia may have gotten the better of me. Visitors may not seek wildness any more than they seek the remarkable beauty of a lioness cleaning her cubs, or tiny baby warthog racing after mom. And for all those wonderful experiences and so much more, the Mara is the place!

Arusha’s Getty

Arusha’s Getty

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Even Arusha has its J. Paul Getty. As we ended the Tanzanian portion of our safari, we visited Cultural Heritage, a tourist landmark that may have done more for northern Tanzanian tourism than the paved road to Manyara.

Initially a curio shop, Cultural Heritage has finally fully embraced its name. Yes, you can buy most everything you see, but it has legitimately become an exceptional museum.

The enormous complex is the brainchild of Saifuddin Khanbhai, mostly known just as Saif. He doesn’t appear as much as he used to, but you’ll never get out of his site. He personally designed this behemoth building, personally welcomed Bill Clinton and a score of other dignitaries, and if he’s around, he still personally negotiates your Tanzanite purchase.

Saif didn’t have the wild life of J. Paul. He’s a devoted Ismaili, in fact a principal liaison with the sect’s religious leaders in Asia. His family traces its Tanzanian roots back to 1836, and the Cultural Heritage complex to 1976.

Then hardly more than curio duka, Saif’s vision for Cultural Heritage was a long time in the making. The first large reopening was in the early 1990s, when the little store became a very big store on the outskirts of the city. It was linked with the growing popularity of Tanzanite, and Saif’s family had interests in at least one of the only 14 mines near Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I can remember countless client purchases that Saif personally negotiated, but the one that sticks out most amazingly was a young Chicago lawyer who after choosing his gems questioned the value of Saif’s offer.

Saif took out a FedEx envelope, bundled up the jewels and put them inside. He handed the package to my client and told him to take it home and have it appraised, and then to either put the check in the envelope or return the gems.

The envelope came back with a check.

Today adjacent a huge store with precious antiques and modern curios, clothing, books and maps and virtually anything at all related to visiting and enjoying Tanzania, there’s also a restaurant and now a mammoth four-story “museum.”

I see Saif as Arusha’s J. Paul Getty. There’s no question he’s out to make a buck, and like Getty he was the brunt of much local gossip when he first began this effort. And like Getty his first and foremost motivation is to make a buck, and an honest one, and in the course of doing so he either wants to or perforce is raising Arusha’s cultural standing.

Much of the collection strikes me as priceless. Some of the deep African masks, chairs, parts of buildings, dhows and doors, musical instruments and ancient beaded work is extraordinarily precious and has been collected from far and wide. I’m a bit turned off, though, by much of the local stuff. Some of the amateur paintings that are displayed are pretty bad, though I do understand his desire to promote local artists.

But get past the local stuff into the heart of Africa and you’ll be absolutely amazed. And there is so much, so unbelievably much for this little city of Arusha, that you can’t help but be overwhelmed.

I’ve seen museum buyers often in the store, and I imagine it takes them hours to sort treasures from trinkets, but I have no doubt the sort is worth the time!

Congratulations, Saif! Arusha owes you big time!

Umbrellas in the Dry Season

Umbrellas in the Dry Season

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At home whether it’s raining or not doesn’t mean much. On safari it means a lot to me as the guide. What we do, when we do it, planned months ahead, is predicated on where and when it’s going to rain. That’s now near impossible with global warming.

We were all having drinks tonight before dinner at Swala Camp in Tarangire when the thunderstorms began. Chris Benchetler left the room to try to get photos, and in fact the heaviest rain seemed over. Everyone was scrambling for umbrellas which the manager was fetching from some far away storehouse.

This is supposed to be the driest time of the year. We flew into the Serengeti through a terrible thunderstorm. Where we landed was so dry that your lips cracked even before getting out of the plane. Yet we could see some of the heaviest rain imaginable less than 5 miles away.

And today in Tarangire, in what’s supposed to be the driest time of the year, we got nearly 3 inches of rain in less than two hours. We ate dinner in Swala’s beautiful open-air dining hall with the moisture of heavy rain filling the veld.

I watched black paradise flycatchers doing their mating dance as if it were March! What’s going on? Global warming, and while it may make my job more difficult, I dare not imagine how it’s screwed up Tanzanian farmers.

The leopard to left was photographed by Sue MacDonald, today, in Tarangire near the Silale swamp. Before the morning was over, we had seen five leopards, including two 2-month old cubs. Now that was a bonus. Leopard don’t usually like their cubs seen by a dragonfly much less a tourist, although admittedly we were several hundred yards away.

Sue by the way celebrated her 24th birthday with us on our safari (or was it 25?) We had a riproaring evening at Gibb’s Farm with the staff singing Happy Birthday to her. Lynn and David Heiman are joining the chorus!

Gibb’s as always is one of the most favorite stops on safari. The rooms are spectacular by East African standards, more like a fisherman’s cottage in Nantucket than a safari room. The setting in the Ngorongoro highlands reminds many of Tuscany, and the organic food on the farm is stupendous.

Tarangire is known for its ele, and we were certainly not disappointed. I have a long history with ele as you readers of my blog know, and I’m not exaggerating to say that the numbers we saw in Tarangire this time surprised even me.

In the Silale swamp alone we probably saw a thousand. Now by Charles Foley’s latest count, that would mean a quarter of all the ele in Tarangire, and I suppose that’s possible. But it was absolutely magnificent. I wish I could show you a picture, but really no one in our group — including some rather accomplished photographers like Roger Gelfenbein — were capable of giving me a photo that worked.

So you’ll have to let your imaginations soar with this little snapshot I took of Sue, Roger and Ellen Sirlin watching just one jumbo yesterday.

Safari Snaps!

Safari Snaps!

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Ski pro Chris Benchetler and new wife, snowboard pro Kimmy Fasani, were dressing like they were on the slopes not the Serengeti! But guess what, it can be cold!

No matter how hard I try, no matter how much our literature tells people to DRESS FOR COLD, most every traveler just presumes that Africa will be hot and uncomfortable. Sometimes, it is. But often, it isn’t! Chris and Kimmy were decked out in all their sponsors’ attire (which, by the way, is quite good). But quite a few of my other travelers were cold!

Now on the other hand, get this. True to form and all our warnings, one out of twelve of my travelers arrived without luggage! Ellen Sirlin had also been foiled by the unusual 9/11 baggage restrictions in Heathrow, so she didn’t even have a survival bag.

So Ellen and I went out on the streets of Nairobi and spent around $65 on a safari wardrobe for her! Well, I should say the beginnings of a safari wardrobe. Take a look at the left at Ellen’s “safari attire.” With only a few hours, she mustered a sewing kit, scissors and an iron and turned some raw stuff we found on the street into a rather stunning look.

David Heiman is admiring her … in clothes that came with his luggage.

We’ve had way too many flats already this safari, 4. I normally get one or two. Tumaini says it’s because he decided to try a new brand, and well, obviously it didn’t work.

Traditionally safari tires were tubed. That’s because they’re easy to fix that way. But lately we’ve all been buying the new tubeless, and they really ride a lot better. But of course, each puncture in them is a lot more difficult to fix than on a tubed tire.

Another thing: travelers understandably always want to know how long it’s going to take to get from point A to point B. Well, you can see from this photo, the right answer is “it depends.”

Sue MacDonald, Margy Gelfenbein and Kimmy Fasani posed for me in front of the migration in northern Tanzania. I’m not a very good photographer and just have a tiny snapshot camera, so I have to explain that the micro dots in the distance are the migration!

But note how green the veld is, and how beautiful the travelers are!

Mustering the Migration

Mustering the Migration

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It’s very hard to know how much to push yourself on safari, and it’s difficult for the guide to know how much you really want to. Today we found the migration in northern Tanzania – it was an absolutely Number Ten experience. But it was psychically expensive.

We left camp at 815a and we returned at 645p. The object of the day was to find the migration. The safari plan is to experience the migration at the end of the trip, in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, but a couple people were leaving the trip early and the simple drama of the notion we could see the migration earlier in Tanzania compelled everyone to try.

The rains have been unusual. (Hardly news, eh?) If they weren’t the vast bulk of the migration would have been out of Tanzania by the end of July at the latest. And it wouldn’t normally begin to return until a little bit later than now.

But as I’ve often written, global warming has a net increase in wetness to the equatorial regions. It’s sometimes hard to understand when all that’s in the newspapers is the “worst drought in 60 years” but consider our own situation in America. Texas has the “worst drought in 60 years” but the majority of the country has been unusually wet. Ditto for East Africa the last few years running.

The terrain in northern Tanzania is identical to Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Same altitude, same rolling hills, same rivers and creeks, and when wet, same beautiful grasslands. So for the last few years, the migration has often lingered longer in northern Tanzania or returned earlier from Kenya.

In fact, what I think is actually happening is neither. I think the range of the northern migration is spanning out south to north. That means less of a concentration anywhere, but a larger area of thick wildlife.

Whichever it is, quite a few Tanzanian companies have bet it’s going to continue. Once up north we passed six new semi-permanent camps erected at great expense far from a southern supply source, to cater to travelers wanting to “see the migration” in Tanzania.

Where we believed from on-the-ground info the migration could be seen was 150k from our camp on Mukoma Hill in the central Serengeti. The roads up to the area weren’t bad, so it mean we’d have a day of about 6 hours just traveling (3 there and 3 back), albeit through game areas.

But if we were to keep focused it meant we had to race right bye other great things!

We were out of camp hardly more than 20 minutes when we came upon a pod of hippo in the Seronera River. People began to click away, and my driver, Tumaini, knew that he had to keep them moving if we were to reach the northern Serengeti early enough to enjoy it. So he hurried people along.

Right around Seronera the veld was remarkably green. In fact, I presumed it would continue green and damp all the way north and so I began to worry what effect this unusual weather might play on the traditional March/April migration safari. But hardly before I was done worrying, we had entered a prolonged period of dryness, typical for this time of the year.

That dry swath continued all the way from the western road junction past Lobo almost to Balaganjwe. But then near just south of the Balaganjwe west of the Megogwa Hills the veld turned beautiful lemony yellow. Grass was everywhere, and so were wilde! This was about 10k south of the Sand River gate into Kenya (Maasai Mara).

We then used the Tanzanian park services’ new roads and tracks to follow the Sand River northwest to where it merged with the Mara right on the border. Kenyan travelers will know this as the “Mara Bridge” area. There were wilde everywhere, on both sides of the river. We watched a river crossing over the Sand River which was quite exciting.

Except for the green veld this far south, everything else looked pretty normal. The Sand River was dry at times, and the Mara though flowing nicely was not unusually high. We didn’t see many crocs; I had the impression they’d already eaten, but there were many nooks and crannies of the rivers that caught hunks of dead wilde with lots of birds.

In addition to the migration, my travelers saw for the first time both eland and topi. We’ll likely get them both in the crater later on, but it was an unexpected bonus for many.

We were diverted from lunch, once again on this safari!, by lion. A beautiful tree we had picked out at a distance on a hill that gave us great views had already been taken by four beautiful, fat and sassy young lion. Some great pictures!

So after lunch we went a little bit further but then had to turn back in order to get home in time. So all told, we had about three hours of great migration viewing.

But it was a very, very long day. And given that most of the veld is normal, that meant very dusty and very bumpy. Parks services fix roads right after the rainy season, but now with intermittent and often heavy rains at unusual times, the roads grow bad more often than before. And there’s either not enough money or willpower, or both, for the parks to maintain the roads more often.

I know that at least half my travelers this time wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Roger, Chris and Kimmy, and Sue were pretty ecstatic about the day. And it’s a hard call to make for the guide to even bring up the subject, because inevitably there are going to be travelers who join the pack when they really don’t want to.

But all told I was pretty satisfied. It was a truly beautiful sight. Nowhere near as crowded with other tourists and vehicles as in the migration areas in Kenya. But do we presume this will happen all the time, now?

As a betting man, I’d say yes. But wait for our report on the migration in Kenya, which ends this safari! Getting to this area of northern Tanzania is costly, time consuming and for some, stressful. In the end is it worth it? Stay tuned.

Ho-Hum Just a Routine Day on Safari!

Ho-Hum Just a Routine Day on Safari!

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Bumpy road, alkaline dust, wind in your face. And a honey badger, some impala, hartebeest, elephant, a serval in a tree killed by a leopard and a family of 11 lion taking down a bull buffalo.

Anyone who only reads first paragraphs might be misled.

It was hardly an ordinary start. We lucked out big time. Sue MacDonald kept saying “I don’t believe; can you believe it?” And as is often the case with great game drives, it was basically luck and not strategy that took us to this extraordinary beginning.

Following the first couple days in Nairobi for our normal political and cultural touring and to shake as much jetlag as possible into the congested throngs of people we walked through on the street, we flew into the southwest Serengeti, to Ndutu Lodge. Yesterday there were two others besides our group, and today we’re alone. This is because of the common knowledge that the migration which is centered here in March and April is long gone.

But what so many television special driven tourists don’t reflect on is that animals and wilderness does not follow a TV schedule. It goes on year-round. Sure there will be times that will basically provide more animals than others, but there are very special things that happen at all the different times of the year.

I’ve written before about the discovery of the buffalo virus that was leading to more lion kills and lion deaths, but even so lion killing a buffalo is no easy task. I don’t think a lion even considers taking down a buf unless more customary food like zebra and wildebeest aren’t available. It would be like going to Whole Foods for a last-minute Friday snack and buying a complete Angus.

And that’s the case at Ndutu in the middle of the dry season. (By the way, we arrived in a rain storm, and it’s rainy today as well, but that’s really unusual. And the area essentially remains very dry.) So for the lion of Ndutu, dinner is always a challenge.

We’d heard in the middle of the night the anxious lion roars and hyanea yelps. We’d hardly been out for a few minutes past daylight when Dixon spotted a lone female walking fast on the top of a ridge about 500 yards away.

We drove up to her and I immediately noticed that she was limping, and that her belly was terribly contracted, a sign she hadn’t eaten for days. Clearly last night she was involved in a failed hunt of something that injured her right shoulder.

She took no notice of us and kept on her mission driven limped walk. She hesitated only momentarily to call and then listened as another lion called back from the far distance. She started to walk again.

Then all of a sudden out of some low bushes runs a subadult male covered in blood. The female we had been following laid her ears close to her head, turned tale and began running with the bloody faced male in close pursuit.

She was obviously not a part of the pride that currently owned this territory, but rather than following her we wanted to figure out the bloody face of the pursuer.

Soon we found other lion, three mature females and five cubs of various ages, all bloodied but clustered together as if something was attacking them.

Then we saw literally ten feet from our car in the bush a giant male buffalo.

He was obviously dying. The giant, awesome beast lifted his head back towards me and I saw that distinctive glaze in the eyes of a dying animal. Animals have expressions just like us, just not in the face.

Every time a lion got near him he’d stand up and begin to swing his deadly horns.

The older lion knew to stay well away, but the younger kids couldn’t suppress their hunger. They would move towards him, even jump on him, and he’d growl and swing his head. The youngest cub, about 4½ months old, got a seething cash on his little neck.

So we watched this for some time as the buffalo seemed to be on his last breath, and then when he seemed to stop breathing, a lion would close in, and he would stumble to his feet swinging his head, braying.

Finally, still alive, he lost all strength and the family knew it. They were on him at once: the kids on the back, the larger lion digging into the soft flesh areas. We left before he was dead.

A few hours later, on our way back to the lodge, we stopped to review the situation, and the buf was dead. In just that short several hours the lion had carved an enormous amount from the available meat and most were too full to eat another bite. But the male was close on the kill, as they always are, reluctant to give way so long as a single morsel of meat is left.

Even though he was too full to eat it.

Then came our second wonder. Two elephant were strolling down the lake shore which was about 50 yards away. But the wind was directly on them, off the kill, and immediately the mother ele started scenting the air.

Before long she was charging the lion, chasing them away and trumpeting loudly. The lion dutifully stood clear, the male the last to do so, and she kept up the harassment until for some reason she felt appropriately vindicated, and went off.

No. It was not an ordinary start to a safari. But on the other hand it wasn’t totally unusual. This is the most stressful time for Ndutu. Except for the aberrant rains that came with us, the veld is parched, a powdery salt blown almost like smog into the mostly still veld by the dawn and dusk breezes. Unlike March when I’m here, there is only a fraction of the normal bird song, a thin sliver of the number of animals always here then.

But predators don’t migrate. If they’re to survive, this is when they have to show their stuff. And for the lucky visitor, like us, a once-in-a-lifetime scene unfolds into our own alien world.

Saving A Penny with Davey Jones

Saving A Penny with Davey Jones

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For some clients, today, traveling for leisure is being squeezed by the economy. And as a result, they’re making some very dangerous decisions. Tight economic times are absolutely not the time to dismiss expert advice.

I can think of no better example than the horrible tragedy last Friday in Tanzania. One of the ferries that plies between Zanzibar and Dar capsized. At least 200 people are dead or missing.

The usual way for a tourist to get between mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar is to fly. From Dar, the quick 15-minute flight costs around $60. Recently, I had a client booked this way who discovered on her own that one of the 5 daily ferries between Dar and Zanzibar would cost her only $8.

Now my first task was to determine if this was really a budget issue or something else. Since her overall safari was well over $5000 it seemed silly she would be interested in saving $50 particularly when it wasn’t very comfortable and took 6-8 times as long.

But it seems so romantic, she said.

A ferry that is licensed to carry 400 people and that often carries 600 is not particularly romantic.

I have nothing else going that day, she retorted.

At this point, one begins to wonder if this is becoming one of those epic battles between the expert (me) and the client (her) over my alleged disrespect for her budgetary and travel research capabilities.

I’d like to get to know the local people, she added.

At which point I laid down the gauntlet and said the ferry schedule was totally unreliable, they only depart when they fill up, they have a terrible safety record and my straight-out advice is don’t do it.

She did.

Fortunately, she wasn’t on the ferry last Friday. Her ferry went off more or less on schedule, it was a fine sailing day, and I’m sure she’s telling everyone she meets that it was one of the best parts of her safari.

And that she really had to fight with her travel expert to do it.

This isn’t just an “I-told-you-so” anecdote. As a traveler, you can do it on your own, or you can do it with an expert. A lot of people can do it on their own quite well, and I’m the first to champion the feelings of personal accomplishment and excitement that comes with plotting your own distant explorations.

But don’t mix and match.

Personally arranged travel to exotic places carries significant risk that is a part of the whole adventure experience. I know that better than anyone. The challenge of personally overcoming intrinsic difficulties are the same as felt by the climber of McKinley or the swimmer of the English Channel.

But here’s the point. Had she arranged her own safari on her own completely, she would have learned that the ferries are unreliable and dangerous. She might then – as I have, especially in my youth – played the odds and gone, anyway. And in her case, she would be vindicated.

But she had no clue. Because she relinquished the responsibility initially to me to get her to Zanzibar from the mainland, I (a) did not believe that she wanted a daring experience and (b) knew that the 1% savings of her trip was not worth the added risk.

She was not in a position to make such a determination.

So what was her beef? Well, in all honesty, I think the squeeze of the economy is getting to people. Like so many others, this was a trip of a lifetime for her. A retired teacher, she had saved and saved, and no doubt those savings were less than she expected.

And probably she felt the villains who reduced her 401K weren’t so dissimilar to the villain (me) who was trying to extort her.

Beware, dear travelers, of projecting your angers and stress onto your advisers. Most of us aren’t going to ask you to pay for something you don’t have to do, and we certainly aren’t going to jeopardize the possibility of giving you a “trip of a lifetime” so you can save a penny with Davey Jones.

How Not To Travel

How Not To Travel

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As we drove from the airport to the city last night, my newly arrived clients asked about the kidnaped British couple. The news isn’t good for Kenyan tourism, of course, but it isn’t surprising, either.

The couple, Judith and David Tebutt, were vacationing at a lovely beach resort on the mainland opposite Lamu Island off Kenya’s far northern coast. There are several truly beautiful paradise getaways in the area, but I’ve felt for a long time it wasn’t a good place to go.

About two years ago another British couple had been kidnaped while sailing their yacht in the Indian Ocean between the Seychelles and Somalia. Both situations were just too vulnerable to pirate attacks.

Initial news reports suggested the Tebutts’ kidnappers were al-Shabaab terrorists. I knew they weren’t, and later reports confirmed they are likely pirates.

The Tebutts and Paul and Rachel Chandler, the sailing couple, were in places they should not have been. So why were they there?

Both couples were doing little more than believing the advertisements that lured them to these tropical paradises without doing due diligence on the grandiose claims.

The Tebutts obviously didn’t read the New York Times and the many world newspapers that republished that story the day before they arrived of increased trouble in the area.

And if you think that’s unfair that a couple on holiday should be reading about where they’re planning to go the next day, certainly they had looked at maps before leaving England, hadn’t they? The Kiwayuu Resort where they were is less than 20 miles from the trouble in Somalia. Unlike Lamu, a heavily populated tropical island with lots of police, their beach was remote and unguarded.

And as for the Chandlers, the weak claim by Rachel that the Seychelles’ waters were “thought to be safe” is balderdash. Not long before their kidnaping a Greek freighter 1000 times bigger than their yacht was hijacked by pirates.

Don’t think me heartless. I’ve been in similar situations myself and involved in several more. We all would prefer a world where everything you read or hear is true. But my own past mistakes are not justification for others’, now.

I’ve learned, and you as travelers should all learn, that neither pretty picture advertisements or simple recommendations from friends who have been somewhere once stand as solid endorsements that it’s a good place to go. You’ve got to check it out further.

As a postscript, note that the resort from where the Tebutts were kidnaped has been closed “indefinitely.” Seeing as how the Tebutts were the only ones at the resort, it seems a rather de facto announcement. The other few resorts in the same area should follow suit.

Oiled Men vs. Oil Men

Oiled Men vs. Oil Men

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I went to bed last night with a sore throat caused by a horrible oil spill disaster near the Nairobi airport and woke to learn that hundreds had died, thousands more had burned and the still unfolding story needs to be told again and again to the west. Read on, if you can.

My luxury Norfolk Hotel is about nine kilometers as the crow flies from the disaster site. In that mere 5½ miles live up to 1 million people, and there are no high-rises. Nearly 90% of them in the slum only 1 mile from the airport where the fire occurred.

They live in the most miserable conditions imaginable. When I first wrote my novel, Chasm Gorge, I described a Nairobi slum but tried to focus on its better aspects. The way slum dwellers help each other, creative methods by which they eke out a living, and most of all their unbelievable tolerance of their suffering.

That was ten years ago. Today the slums are three or four times larger. The popular film Constant Gardener brought world attention to the slum, Kibera, that was the model for my description. Kibera is one of 8 slums around Nairobi, and if one dare compare one slum with another, probably the best one to live in.

How many people live there? I can’t find out. The Kenyan government can’t find out. At least 2 million, but perhaps 3 maybe even 4 million. The last good census of slum dwellers was more than ten years ago. It was so flawed, I think people just gave up. Ten years ago I would never have imagined the situation would have reached the tragedy of today.

YET…
…the tolerance for suffering continues.

We know in America what happened in the 1960s was at least partially the result of popular uprisings against the abhorrent conditions found in Cabrina Green in Chicago or Watts in Los Angeles. And those conditions compared to what is found in Nairobi today are simply incomparable.

Here’s what happened yesterday. An oil pipeline bringing super gas refined in the coastal city of Mombasa and flowing at 590,000 liters/hour ruptured around 9 a.m. The pipeline runs under a slum. This was the third major Kenyan oil pipeline spill since 2009. And frankly, compared to the other two, it was small. (Probably less than a half million liters were lost before the pipeline was shut down.)

But it has been raining unusually in this dry season in Nairobi, and the oil made its way to a river that now flows through the slums. When residents realized from the smell what it was, they frantically began trying to collect it from the top of the water.

Someone’s cigarette dropped on the river. The fire exploded back up the line towards the pipeline rupture, and in its way was the slum. In seconds, tin shacks were ashes. Giant plumes of toxic smoke filled the air. Some residents on fire jumped into the river, but it was burning. Old manholes on sewers that have been stuffed and inoperable for decades blew into the air like rockets, giant fire spraying from them.

The official death toll as I write this is only 130. It will be much more. Hundreds are missing.

That’s the tragedy.

Now, can you imagine what would happen in the U.S. or Britain or Australia if something like this occurred? Well, guess who was the star guest interviewed on all the Kenyan TV channels this morning? The director of the pipeline company. But no one felt he should be blamed. Even the tweets and comments by people who live in the slums have exonerated him.

Everyone needs gas. They think he was doing the best job he could. As a result, he was totally honest about how bad the maintenance is on the pipeline, how much less the government has actually given him to operate it than he needs.

Did the Governor of California walk into Watts as it burned? Or the mayor of Chicago strol down burned out Wabash Avenue after the fires following the King assassination? Of course not.

But here the Prime Minister of the country and virtually every major political officer was in the slums this morning talking with residents, promising better conditions, pleading for the calm which already exists.

In Kenya and all the developing world on this planet, suffering is a way of life. When people ask me how possibly we can help, my answer has been steadfastly the same for decades and decades:

First, put your own house in order. If we cannot muster the human compassion to take care of our own uninsured, unemployed and immigrant populations, how can we possibly help others?

Second, forget about little charities, church bake-outs and tiny missions building little huts in the desert. This is all wasted energy. It makes us feel good, but it doesn’t do a damn thing for the developing country. This is because the solutions – whatever they are – must be massive.

I really believe, though, this is possible. I believe we can sweep away the TParty and similar thinking people into the dustbin of history. Human compassion is greater than human ignorance, as great as that ignorance currently seems to be.

So, Americans, start at home. Not with a greater tithe to your church, but with a renewed commitment to your society and government, and a willingness to sacrifice for the good of those less fortunate. And when elements in your society appear intransigent in face of this simple dictum, punish them. Force them to respond with higher taxes on them, stiffer regulations.

Make them share the happiness they achieve through other’s sorrow.

I know there is a knee jerk reaction to find a website to contribute to the “Nairobi fire.” But what about the Pakistani floods? What about your own floods?

The suffering in the world which is a result of poverty is structural. It can be changed. Start at home with the kingpins refusing to change, because we are at the top, we can make the most difference worldwide by simply doing our job at home.

What 9-11 Means to Me & Africa

What 9-11 Means to Me & Africa

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Nine Eleven was a day of reflection, but in Kenya where I am it exploded. A British tourist was murdered and his wife kidnaped in the far north as southern Somalia imploded further, and Kenya desperately appealed to U.S. Republicans not to undermine its development by making it the victim of the U.S. budget crisis.

It’s all inextricably linked. It might be complicated, and that may be its nemesis with the simple minds of the Tea Party, and there’s too much here for a single blog. Tomorrow I’ll be less ideological and more news specific, but today I want to counter the empathy of yesterday with the horrible reality of the last decade as seen outside the U.S.

Sitting here in a luxury hotel in Nairobi with CNN on during all my waking hours, it’s hard to argue that a clearer perspective is achieved further from home. But it is. The travel through multiple countries and airports, the fellow passengers from all distant parts of the world in stimulating conversation, the foreign newspaper headlines and the incessant chat of the local taxi driver. It takes you far away from the repetitive and often circular news surrounding us in the U.S.

And besides, even CNN isn’t the same. CNN has been fine tuned to its customers worldwide for decades. It’s not the same in China as Dubuque, London or Nairobi. Worldwide, one of its most respected anchors is Jim Clancy, and click here for his own reflections, quite similar to my own. You won’t see this in the U.S.

Let me be so bold as to summarize the rest of the world’s views about Nine Eleven this way: If the U.S. didn’t exercise its power and express its grief militarily, the world – and the U.S. – would be much better off.

To the rest of the world yesterday marked not so much a stabbing memory of abject loss as a tedious decade of wrongdoing.

The number of people who have been killed in military violence this past decade far far exceeds those killed in the initial airplane hijack attacks. Perhaps a third of a million in Pakistan and Afghanistan alone, and hundreds of thousands in Iraq. And these aren’t principally soldiers, but civilians caught in the cross fires of ideology.

Any American who watches the film “United 93” immediately wonders why is this a British and not an American film. It’s the only concise documentary of the bungling of U.S. defense on that day, how probably three of the 4 plane crashes could have been minimized, if only someone in authority could have been found.

This is a British film, not an American one, because Americans seem incapable of admitting this mistake. No American would dare produce it. Watch it.

And this ineptitude was followed by the moral degeneration of a giant reacting to a flea bite by sledge hammering the ground around him, blindly and randomly.

There is no doubt that al-Qaeda targeted us. There is no doubt it was an inept attempt, because al-Qaeda is inept. But al-Qaeda is crazy and dangerous albeit inept, and we knew this years before they acted. We refused to deal with them as deranged, the same way we avoid dealing with our own mentally challenged individuals.

And when they finally ‘lucked out’ we were defenseless.

Thank goodness it wasn’t the Joker or an alien invasion or trained mercenaries from the Comoros, or we might currently be under a foreign military dictatorship. No President or Vice President or other chief political officer could be found to give cogent orders, or perhaps they weren’t found because there weren’t cogent orders to give. Planes that were scrambled flew off in the wrong directions, unarmed.

Our “Homeland Defense” up until September 11, 2001, was to believe we were invincible simply by maintaining nuclear arsenals and giant battleships.

The rest of the world, Europe in particular following the Balkan wars, realized that peace is created by development not destruction.

But we have never nurtured goodwill with the same enthusiasm we nurture military superiority. I think we reacted like the giant squashing the flea not so much to being attacked, as to our own inability to defend against those attacks in any other way. And like a humiliated bully with no social skills, we started scorching the Mideast.

(If oil as the unspoken booty didn’t exist, possibly we couldn’t have mustered the rationalizing to pursue it. But there is oil, there. And oil is needed for the bomber planes.)

And now to today. Sunday talk shows seemed horrified that the Super Committee will be deadlocked and the military required to take a 10% hit. What’s going on? In Africa we have committed 9 billion over ten years to help their medical development. And just before our Nine Eleven celebrations, they were advised this promise might not be kept.

Why might we renege? Because we need that 9 billion for a couple months of war in Afghanistan.

Instead of a decade of improving the health of a billion Africans who are actually on the frontline against terrorism and who are rapidly becoming an economic powerhouse, customers for our iPhones.

I see no starker comment on how wrong we continue to be.

Heading into the Bush!

Heading into the Bush!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Starting tomorrow I will be on safari in East Africa and blogging four times weekly from the field … I hope. Cell phone and internet reception has improved so much I think it really will be possible. We have an exciting safari ahead of us!

It is also a remarkable collection of people, and I’ll try to give you little snapshots of each of them as the days go bye. But I am already specially indebted to newly weds Kim Fasani and Chris Benchetler, who are taking part of their honeymoon with the rest of us.

What did I say? A honeymoon couple joining a bunch of us who are into planning our Golden Wedding Anniversaries? (As happens from time to time, I do slip into a minor exaggeration.)

More specifically, age rarely matters in my groups. Last year, for instance, I actually guided a 7-year old. (He was traveling with his mother.) More to the point, EWT operates a lot of honeymoon safaris, but not really very many where the honeymoon couple joins a group.

But Kimmy seems so incredibly enthusiastic and eager to get virtually everything out of the trip she possibly can, that when I mentioned my safari was more or less overlapping hers, she (presumably pulling her spouse along) jumped aboard!

Don’t get overly empathetic. The two of them do have enough sense to peel away from the group trip at the end to enjoy a most romantic getaway on a remote beach in Zanzibar. (My heart pines remembering those days!)

And, by the way, they won’t be the first. But they do join a very special group of people I’ve had distinct pleasure over the years guiding and getting to know. Their honeymoon is obviously more than just a place to wipe off rice granules from rented garments. They’ve come to be thrilled and to learn something new.

And actually, honeymooners seem to stay in touch a bit more than others. I’ve now followed the first honeymoon couple I can remember guiding through two Labrador Retrievers, then two kids, several houses and jobs, and now … the kids are in college!

My group this time also includes a couple from New York, from Florida, and several from Ohio, so together with Kimmy and Chris who are from a remote locale in Montana, we have a rather wide segment of America on board. The 12 of us are expecting some extraordinary experiences!

The focus as always is on seeing the wild working its miracles and exercising its inexorable power. Although there has been unusual rains this season in areas where it normally doesn’t rain after June, the dynamic of the dry season still appears firmly in control.

That means the veld is getting stressed out, and that means the predators are in their heyday. Of course it remains to be seen, but I expect we’ll see 75 or more lion, at least one leopard and up to a dozen cheetah.

The climax of the trip is in an area where we expect to find part of the great wildebeest migration, at its northern most point, before the herds begin to slowly reassemble themselves in the southern Serengeti. This is always a dramatic time for the migration, with exciting river crossings.

I’ve already heard from friends that the crocs are pretty full and so the river crossings are proceeding without much ado. When they first wake up begin earlier in the season, they are famished, and carnage reigns. We probably won’t see that, now. The big crocs eat only once or twice a year, when the migration comes and goes. They gorge, then basically go to sleep for months.

I’m especially anxious to see the state of the elephant herds in Tarangire. There are too many elephants and have been for the last 5-10 years. We need signs that the population is stabilizing and not continuing to grow, and Tarangire, where we should see (yes) a thousand or more will have the best indicators.

So stay tuned, folks! It’s possible the blogs might not come quite as regularly, but I promise whenever in range to top up each day’s experiences with as much truth as I can possibly muster!

Overland Samburu is OUTlawed

Overland Samburu is OUTlawed

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Just as Russia’s leap into modernity created a powerful mafia, so it now appears that Kenya’s is doing the same. And for travelers this unfortunately means you can no longer travel overland north of Mt. Kenya.

I’ve found myself becoming peculiarly cautious in my golden years, so I reflect when I was a twenty-something year old gallivanting through Idi Amin’s very dangerous Uganda, or even daring to cross the Omo in the presence of desperate, armed thugs. So jungle on, you young’uns, but keep your eyes wide open.

And if you’re one of my clients, I’m afraid we’re staying clear. Of where? Of some of the finest wilderness left in Africa: Samburu and Laikipia, to be precise.

Now there’s still a very safe way to visit these places: fly in. If you fly into the reserve’s airstrip, I’m absolutely confident that you’ll be as safe as the Queen of England shopping at Harrods. But that spectacularly gorgeous drive off Mt. Kenya onto the Great Northern Frontier, or those amazing landscapes between Samburu and Laikipia seen only from the ground … it’s over. At least for the foreseeable future.

This past weekend saw one of the most spectacular, clearly well planned cattle raids ever seen in the history of Kenya. Seven people were killed and scores wounded and a thousand cattle whisked away.

It happened about 50 miles northeast of the Samburu National Park Archer’s Post gate, and about 35 miles north of the nearest lodge in Shaba National Park.

Now admittedly this particular raid is pretty far from tourist areas, but its size got me, and it’s one of a series of raids that’s been increasing in the area. Last year, for instance, there was a gun battle in broad daylight right on the bridge over the Ewaso Nyiro River at Archer’s Post.

This is the only way tourists can enter the area overland.

The weekend raid is about 20 miles from where Joy Adamson was killed by bandits more than three decades ago.

And that’s what gives me perspective. The “Northern Frontier” has always been a lawless land. It’s just too hard to patrol. I remember only 4 years ago having to charter an aircraft for a group of only 11 of us who wanted to drive all of 20 miles from Samburu to a lovely retreat in the Mathews Mountains, because bandits had been sighted on the road we were scheduled to drive.

But bandits stopping cars and taking an occasional goat are way different from what is being reported in today’s modernizing Kenya.

First of all, in order to steal 1000 head of cattle in a single raid, you’ve got to have someone who has a 1000 head of cattle to steal from. That never existed in the days of subsistence herding, where a man with 25 head was a royal chief.

Second, it’s rather hard to conceal 1000 cows. These guys had multiple trucks, using the new Chinese paved road built through the desert to whisk their booty into the markets down south.

According to the police commissioner of the area, law enforcement was outgunned. Shotguns against AK47s.

Recognizing this danger was coming, the Kenyan Government has been aggressively trying to disarm everyone in the area. But according to Member of Parliament from the area in which this giant raid occurred, Abdul Bahari (Isiolo South), “people in Samburu have not been disarmed and even if they have, we have not seen the effect as they seem to have guns during the raids.”

And playing to his constituency as I suppose he has to, a neighboring MP, Adan Keynan (Wajir West) continued during the press conference with a warning to the government.

“We’re giving them seven days, or else we’ll tell our people to protect themselves. We cannot be perpetually talking to a government that does not see, does not hear and does not sense the value of life,” said Mr Keynan.

The drought has something to do with this, of course. It makes the weak, weaker, and it makes the markets more ready to take on stolen goods.

And finally what concerns me most is that the old days’ criminals were very respectful of us tourists. Sometimes, it took a bribe, but nary a hair was mussed. I felt we were respected as distant foreigners interested in a distant land, and part of a movement that in the end everyone living in the area really gained from.

A thousand cattle is a hefty haul. You’d have to have a pretty good tourist season to reach that booty. So I just don’t want to be on that new Chinese road when these guys are in the midst of a heist.